Lunacy Is Sanity

Yup, just as I anticipated, Winston is being tortured.

I learned a lot more about O’Brien. He is extremely passionate about the Party and Big Brother, and that he suffers from a sadistic personality disorder. O’Brien is the interrogator, torturer, teacher, and friend (or “comrade”) to Winston. His main goal is to completely brainwash every “prisoner” in the Ministry of Love by inflicting large amounts of pain and it seems like it will actually work. Winston seems to have a very intelligent and inquisitive mind, so it’s hard to say if it will work on him. Although there was a brief moment that Winston believed that 2 + 2 = 5. It all felt pretty real, but with so much pain being inflicted on Winston’s body, I’m sure it was a hallucination. The real test is to see how O’Brien’s “patient” acts when his answers aren’t based off of a pain meter being hooked up to his body. Perhaps we will get to see what that is like…

Throughout this entire section I thought that we were in Room 101, only to find out near the end that we were not. This was a bit confusing and I think that there could have been a bit more clarification.

However, this scares me because Winston was already being tortured into lunacy (or “sanity” if you are O’Brien). If the Room 101 is a torture room, I cannot imagine what else might possibly be in store for Winston.

On a final note, I’m still not really sure how long Winston has been tortured for. At one point, O’Brien referenced that he had been taking care of Winston for seven years. But later on, when asked how long he thought he’s been there for, Winston guessed months. This is quite a gap for interpretation. Since seven years is a long time to be tortured, I’m going to go with the latter and say Winston has only been in there for several months.

The story continues next week!